In a rare Sunday session, the U.S. Senate considered amendments to a transportation bill, a must-do by Friday before funds run out, without deciding on others related to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) slipped in by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell late in the game. Those amendments would allow information to be withheld when certain thresholds are met. According to a report by R Street Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, public policy research organization, none of these amendments went before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is the committee with jurisdiction on FOIA matters. The Senate will reconsider one version of the bill — more than one with the FOIA amendments are floating around — again Monday night, according to OpenTheGovernment.org.

Prior to Sunday’s session, several government-records transparency advocates including the Sunlight Foundation, the American Society of News Editors, the National Security Archive and the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) penned a letter to Sens. McConnell and Harry Reid, the Democratic leader from Nevada, asking for these exemptions to be dropped from the bill. McConnell has tried this tactic before, and it is expected he will continue to try to limit FOIA. In June he attached a new, 10th exemption to FOIA to the annual defense authorization bill covering all “information shared with or provided to the Federal Government.” In that instance the Senate acted on the concerns of privacy and transparency advocates and voted against attaching the amendment to the broader bill.

Former Deutsche Bank co-CEO Anshu Jain got a letter from the German regulator BaFin this month that cleared him of any suspicion of lying to regulators, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday. The letter represented an “about-face,” the Journal observed, since the regulator had been highly critical of Jain and other executives in a May report to Deutsche Bank’s management board. Although BaFin’s president, Felix Hufeld, said that he “again evaluated all documents” and that the allegation against Jain “seems unsubstantiated,” all other matters raised in the May letter remain under investigation, Hufeld wrote. Those include, according to the Journal, questions about whether Jain took adequate action to stop Libor manipulation. The letter from BaFin is based partially on an independent investigation by EY LLP into the bank’s Libor investigation. A unit of Deutsche Bank agreed to plead guilty to a single count of wire fraud for engaging in a scheme to defraud its trading partners and paid a record fine of $2.5 billion in April to settle U.S. and British Libor-rigging allegations.

Ernst & Young’s Hong Kong member firm turned over audit workpapers prepared by its mainland China joint-venture partner, Ernst & Young Hua Ming, to a Hong Kong regulator, ending its appeal against the regulator, the U.K.’s Economia magazine reported. The litigation dates back to 2012 and relates to Ernst & Young’s work on Standard Water, a Chinese utility. Ernst & Young maintained it did not have the right to comply with the requests, since the records were on the mainland and could not be produced without violating China’s state secrecy laws. The regulator argued that Hong Kong auditors with mainland operations must maintain access to relevant records since the company was listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange. Mark Steward, the SFC’s executive director of enforcement said, “EY could have avoided litigation by conducting proper searches of its own offices here in Hong Kong and, where necessary, cooperating with the mainland authorities to seek clearance of records created by its affiliate firms on the mainland.” In February the Chinese affiliates of the Big Four accounting firms agreed to pay $500,000 each to settle their own dispute with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over their reluctance to give the agency workpapers related to Chinese companies listed on U.S. exchanges under investigation by the SEC. PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, KPMG and Ernst & Young also agreed to comply with future requests for audit documents from the SEC.

Also this week, China has now exempted Hong Kong from rules that ban non–mainland China audit firms from signing off on audits of mainland companies.

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